American Clean Energy And Security Act Of 2009
Floor Speech
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Mr. WALDEN. I want to talk about a couple of things here involving this bill: process, cost, and language.
This is the 309 pages that were printed at 1:34 in the morning and submitted to the Rules Committee sometime around 2:49 this morning. Nobody--it's impossible--I can't imagine anybody's read this.
I've just discovered they change the hydro language so that--it used to say before 1992 it counted, now they have gone back 4 years. Somewhere in the middle of the night we have added 4 years of hydro as renewable. It's page after page after page of technical changes that have major, major impact.
There were nine committees this bill was referred to, and yet only one of them was allowed to have a markup on the bill, the Energy and Commerce Committee. The other eight waived. So a lot of this got put together in the dark of night, backroom deals, whatever you want to say, private conversations; but no committees held a hearing on this new bill, 309 pages, amending the 1,201 that are sitting there on the desk.
Costs. Look at fuel costs: $811 more for Oregonians in 2012. If you're a PacifiCorp customer in Oregon, you can expect in 2012 to pay 17.7 percent higher electricity costs. They have run the numbers according to the bill.
You want to talk about a massive new welfare program for energy? It's in here too. In fact, this energy tax refund, in effect, this proposed energy stamp bill, 16 times the current U.S. welfare program, the TANF program. Sixteen times. It's a whole new welfare program for energy.
If energy costs aren't going up on the rest of us, why do they have to have this? Because it does drive up energy costs. That's going to hurt small businesspeople. It's going to hurt families. It's going to cost jobs. And we don't know for sure what else it does because I can't imagine anybody on this floor has read every word of this bill that was filed at 2:49 a.m. in the Rules Committee and been able to juxtapose what's here against the 1,201 pages.
I urge a ``no'' vote on this bill.
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